


As You Were

by ncfan



Series: Road Trip [1]
Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Canon Speculation, Erik doesn't really know how to be a father to a teenage boy, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, M/M, Post-DOFP, Where's Wanda?, but he tries, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-10 01:01:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2004957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was just trying to figure out if the kid was his son. He didn't expect to end up heading out on a cross-country road trip to find Peter's runaway sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As You Were

**Author's Note:**

> I messed around with some of the comic details to explain how Peter (and presumably Wanda, since I refuse to believe that she doesn't exist in the movie continuity) ended up with the Maximoffs.

" _They told me you control metal. You know, my mom once knew a guy who could do that."_

Beyond a bit of a double-take, Erik hadn't paid much attention to the rapid-fire words out of the boy's mouth at the time. He was too busy reeling at his sudden freedom after ten years of imprisonment, too busy trying not to lose the contents of his stomach from going at speeds he _never_ wished to occupy again. At any rate, everything Peter said, he said so quickly that the words started to bleed together in his mind.

So Peter's mother had known a man who could control metal. All that meant was that she'd once known a mutant who could control metal. Erik couldn't possibly be the only mutant in the world who could do that.

And his surname was Maximoff. Well, the name was certainly _familiar_ to Erik, but the Maximoff family he had known couldn't possibly be the only Maximoff family in the world. Even if Peter was from _that_ Maximoff family, that didn't mean anything.

And Peter was a mutant.

It was a coincidence. Surely it was a coincidence.

But the more Erik thought about it, when he finally had an opportunity to think about it, the more he realized that the details were just a little too coincidental to be coincidence. Peter was a mutant, a member of a family called Maximoff, and his mother had known a man who could control metal. If only one of the details was present, Erik could have discounted it. Even two, he could have chalked up to chance. But all three…

That couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

During the trip from the Pentagon to the airport, Peter had been more than happy to offer up personal details of his life (At least, details that, in a similar situation, Erik would never have volunteered even under pains of death). Erik had been trying not to listen, instead staring holes into the back of Charles's head, almost daring him to turn around and look at him—and when Charles didn't look at him for the entire ride, didn't speak to him or acknowledge his presence in any way, Erik was in no way, shape or form hurt about this, just like he was in no way, shape or form hurt about the fact that Charles had waited ten years to get him out and had never even attempted to contact him in all that time. Anyways…

Anyways, while Erik had been trying not to listen to Peter, he ended up hearing a lot of what the boy said regardless; they were sitting next to one another in the car. He chattered about how slow the car was going, about how he could _definitely_ get to the airport faster than this car ("Could get there faster than a jet!"). This boasting Erik forgave, as the boy had certainly gotten him out of his prison fast enough and he was the last person in the world who would tell a mutant anything that might hint that he shouldn't be proud of his powers. Besides, every person in the car with them was a mutant; what harm could it do?

Peter talked about his life growing up, talked about his little sister, a girl of six named Lorna whom he called "Munchkin" and clearly adored, if the comment that she was the only one he'd sit still for was any indication—Peter fidgeted in his seat the whole ride. He talked about his mom and how she wasn't a mutant, but was "cool, but really super strict", which, reading between the lines, Erik could only suppose meant that the woman was at her wit's end dealing with Peter. To be fair, if Erik was having to raise Peter and he had no way to keep up with the boy, figuratively or literally, he'd probably be at his wit's end with him too. At least she hadn't thrown him out on discovering that her son was a mutant.

Peter talked about his twin, Wanda, who was apparently also a mutant, in a quieter voice, and Erik tried very hard not to notice that every time Peter brought up Wanda, he spoke about her in the past tense.

Come to think about it, Peter had been the only one doing a whole lot of talking in that car. It could have been that he was just cutting everyone else off, but Erik wondered, with some discomfort, if maybe there was a reason Peter had been talking quite so much.

Erik had gleaned enough from Peter's incessant chatter (even if he hadn't been trying to listen) to get a good idea of where the boy lived. His hometown was Alexandria, just south of D.C. Truthfully, Alexandria was not some small town where everyone knew everyone else—far from it. But bizarrely, everyone seemed to know exactly where Peter Maximoff lived, bizarrely enough that with some of the things Erik had been hearing lately in regards to mutants, he found it worrisome.

He had been attempting to make contact with old acquaintances, those who, for whatever reason, be it that they had families they didn't want to endanger (frustrating but understandable) or that the only mutant abilities they possessed didn't really bring anything to the table on a "combat" front or in fact made them unsuitable for combat (understandable and slightly less frustrating) or for other reasons (that varied on the scales of frustration and understandability), had never taken up the fight but still supported him in quieter ways. He'd only gotten through to about a quarter of them. Some, it turned out, had been drafted into Vietnam, and, unfortunately, they had likely ended up on Trask's lab tables. Some of them had disappeared after Erik had sent the word out over national television, and most of those mutants did not strike Erik as the sort to simply leave their families (if they had any), their jobs (if they had any) and their homes (if they had any) without giving word to _someone_.

The rest had simply vanished, and no one could say when or how.

These were the people Erik had instructed to lie low if things went wrong in Dallas. Lying low, they could do; they'd been lying low ever since their mutations emerged. For them to just vanish… It concerned him. Better to make sure that Peter hadn't "vanished" too.

But as he neared the house one fine morning, he found himself assailed by thoughts that had nothing to do with various possible nefarious schemes against mutants.

_I can't believe I have children._

_What is Magda even doing in the U.S.? She could barely speak any English, though I suppose that since it's been nearly twenty years since we last saw each other, that may have changed._

_I can't believe I have children._

_Why didn't she contact me?_ When Erik realized why Magda had likely not tried to contact him, he flinched and moved on to a different line of thought. Unfortunately…

_I can't believe I have children._

It happened to be a bit redundant.

When his line of thought reached a bemused, almost terrified _Should I have bought flowers?_ Erik decided that maybe Charles had addled his brains the last time he was inside his head, just a little bit. He'd have to have a word with him about that later.

Erik did _not_ hesitate to walk up the front path to the front door. He did _not_ hesitate to knock on the front door. In fact, if he had been moving any more quickly towards the door, he would have been running. He quickly calmed the hammering of his heart and knocked sharply on the door.

He was expecting Peter, or Magda or Wanda or maybe even the little girl Peter had spoken of. Instead, he was greeted by another who, while not being whom Erik had expected, was nonetheless familiar to him.

Marya Maximoff, looking worn and exasperated, drank in the sight of his black suit and matching hat (contrary to popular opinion, Erik knew better than to travel through suburban Virginia wearing armor and a cape—even if he had quite deliberately left the helmet at the White House) before she got a good look at his face. "Peter!" she called into the house, scowling, "the cops are…" She trailed off.

Erik had taken his hat off. When Marya got a good look at his face, she paled. He sucked in a deep breath and said, "Hello, Marya."

"Oh my God," she muttered, somehow managing to pull off a look of simultaneous anger, worry and terror. What Marya did next was to frantically wave him inside, hissing, "Get inside before someone sees you and we get ten kinds of hell falling on us."

Well. Out of all the possible greetings Erik had been expecting, that certainly wasn't one of them.

Marya shut the door behind him with a firm slam and a twist of the lock and the deadbolt. She wasn't trying to keep him in, Erik realized; she was trying to keep anyone else who might come in out. Oh no, that wasn't worrisome at all. "Marya, I—"

"I saw your… _performance_ on television," she muttered, going around and making sure that all of the windows were locked, before drawing the curtains shut. "Figures; you drop off the face of the earth for nineteen years after scaring the living daylights out of my cousin, and the first time we hear from you again, you scare the living daylights out of my daughter. It was all Peter and I could do to calm her down once the shock wore off. You have to admit—" There was a sharp, almost feral quality to her smile, but there was misery lurking behind the surface of her eyes, and a question there too, though Erik wasn't sure what it was "—there's a certain amount of symmetry to it."

There weren't a whole lot of people who could talk to Erik like that, and without provocation to boot, and not expect to be seriously injured soon after, but this was a special case. He knew also that it was difficult to appear intimidating to a woman whose clearest image of him was likely that of a gawky, malnourished twelve-year-old whose voice broke on high notes and who stared at her favorite cousin like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Especially considering that the last time they'd laid eyes on each other, he was a gawky, only slightly better-nourished eighteen-year-old, newly married to her favorite cousin and _still_ staring at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. That tended not to leave an impression of dignity in the minds of others. As much as it irked him that his appeal to mutantkind had been reduced to a 'performance' by Marya's description.

Marya was pausing at the last of the living room windows, her hands poised over the curtains. She looked back at him, standing in the foyer and convinced that he had never felt so awkward and out-of-place as he did now, out of the corner of her eye, half-obscured by long blonde hair. Erik remembered when it had still been short; she'd been eighteen the last time he saw her, when she and her father had relocated to New York. "Why… are you here?" There was the undercurrent of fear, a tone Erik had heard many take when speaking to him.

"…Peter…" The fact that, for the life of him, he couldn't think of what to say, well that was absolutely unacceptable. He knew exactly what he wanted to ask, but when he tried, he found himself tongue-tied. Perhaps… Perhaps that was because it was a question he was almost certain he already knew the answer to.

"What about him?" The fear was still there, in her now-strained voice.

"Is… He's my son, isn't he?" By contrast, Erik's voice was flat, detached. He could almost pretend that he didn't suddenly feel like the world was hinging on Marya's answer.

She turned about to face him. "Yes, he is."

"And Wanda?"

"Well, she and Peter are twins, so I don't see how she could possibly be anyone _else's_ kid."

Erik let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

"And… Is Magda here?" The words were more painful than they should have been. "I would like to speak with her."

It had been years since he'd fumbled over his words like this. In prison, he'd always had a ready answer for every last barb and jibe and bored question his guards had thrown at him. But then, this was not a normal situation at all.

Marya shook her head choppily. "No." Her mouth formed a thin, twitching line. "She died when the twins were about three. She… She didn't like to talk about why the two of you separated, but she told me what happened." Marya's shoulders sagged. "I'm sorry, Erik."

"Save your sympathy." The answer was rote and brittle, the way he had always rehearsed it in his head if he happened to run into someone who knew "what happened." "Are Peter and Wanda here?"

At this, Marya rolled her eyes. "Peter's in the basement. Try to ignore the stolen goods; ignoring them is about the only way I can have a conversation with him anymore that doesn't involve 'why aren't you afraid of going to prison?!' And don't even ask me how he got that arcade machine home!"

Erik snorted. He'd noticed Peter's sticky fingers during their car ride from the Pentagon to the airport. He did, however, also notice that Marya said not a word about Wanda, whom he hadn't even seen. "What about Wanda?" And Erik couldn't remember the last time he had heard himself sound so… earnest. Eager, even. "Is she here?"

Marya's face fell. "No," she muttered, looking away. "She ran away about a year ago." The woman practically radiated shame. She cut Erik off before he could reply. "But like I said, Peter's in the basement. Go talk with him, if you can get him to listen."

-0-0-0-

It was so much _worse_ than Erik had thought.

The basement was filled with things—Twinkies, Ding Dongs, televisions and other appliances—that Peter had obviously stolen. Erik had no idea why there would be so many microwaves in the basement otherwise, and _what does he even want with so many microwaves?_ And the arcade machine… Erik had thought Marya was exaggerating, or even out-and-out joking. But no, there was one here, and somehow Erik doubted that Peter had acquired it by legitimate means. How _had_ he gotten it home?

_I never would have let him steal all of this. There are better things for a mutant to be doing with his time and powers than divesting grocery stores of their snack goods._

_Well, the answer is simple_ , came the sounding of a voice in the back of his head, that bitter voice that Erik usually only heard from when he'd had more than was advisable to drink. _Marya isn't one of us; she has no way of keeping up with Peter and no other way of leveling the playing field. She's tried as best she can, but ultimately, how can she be expected to effectively deal with Peter? Now you, on the other hand, you likely could have effected a change in his behavior, if you'd been here._ There was, on the whole, likely a reason Erik usually only heard from this voice when he was drunk.

It didn't take Peter long to spot him; the boy appeared to just be finishing up with a magazine of some kind. Peter waved languidly (or what was probably languid by his standards, anyways; his hand was only _nearly_ a blur), before zipping out of his chair and coming to stand entirely too close to Erik for his liking. "You know, I didn't break you out of the Pentagon just so you could try and kill yet another president." There was none of the laughter in his voice that Erik had heard in the Pentagon, genuine, mocking or otherwise. "I mean, yeah, it's Nixon and all, and he's kind of an asshole—course, how would you know that; you were still in prison when that thing with Ellsberg blew up—but still…"

Before Erik could back up or tell Peter to back away, the boy was gone in a grayish blur. The next thing he knew, Peter was back on that chair of his, munching on a Twinkie and looking at him with the distinct air of someone who felt that he was owed an explanation.

Erik found himself staring at Peter rather than immediately giving any explanation (And the idea that he owed anyone any explanation for anything…). He'd not really gotten a good look at him in the Pentagon, one, because he hadn't realized who the boy was at the time, and two, Peter was just moving too quickly for anyone to get a good look at him. Peter didn't really look a whole lot like him—come to think of it, he didn't look a whole lot like Magda, either, and even if Peter had resembled either of his parents, the gray hair probably would have drawn the eye away. The jaw was his. Maybe. If you squinted.

_At least no one's made him disappear either._

Then…

_I wonder what he looked like when he was little._

Okay, obviously Erik needed to focus better.

Peter seemed to think so, too. He shot a slightly nonplussed look at Erik, just as he finished up his third Twinkie. "You… just gonna stare at me all day?" he asked, almost as slowly as that second delivery of _'whiiiplaaaash'_ in the Pentagon.

"If I could clarify my 'involvement' in the Kennedy assassination—"

"I saw that one on the tube too! That's crazy! What is it with you and the president, anyways? You got a grudge against the office or something?"

"I was trying to save him," Erik told him shortly.

The only response he got was a set of raised eyebrows and what Erik was sure must have been the thought _Sure you were_.

"He was one of us," Erik explained (And was amazed at himself immediately afterwards; there were only a few people alive whom he could name who he would actually even think of explaining his actions to). "Kennedy's actual assassin had gotten wind of this and was set on killing him."

"Your aim must suck, then," Peter told him frankly. The skeptical look was gone from his face, but Erik suspected that the thought that had replaced it was _Damn, no one would admit to screwing up that badly unless they really had._

"I was the only one who could save him."

"You've got an ego on you, don'tcha?"

Said or thought practically everyone Erik had interacted with in the past month. And that included Charles.

The two stared at one another for another protracted moment, Peter pausing even from devouring his ill-gotten Twinkies. Erik watched as the boy brushed the crumbs off of his shirt and wiped the rest from his hands. "Soooo… To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Peter asked, miming an English accent—he sounded almost disturbingly like Charles when he did that, and it honestly made Erik wish Charles was here. After a moment, he told himself that he wished Charles was here so he wouldn't have to do this by himself. "And in normal clothes, no less." There was, much like Marya, something quite feral in that grin of his, but Erik could see from one look at Peter's eyes that he had no idea what he was doing here—what he was to him.

"Peter—"

"If it's to recruit me to your brand-new terrorist group, thanks but no thanks. I mean—" Peter pointed to himself with both hands and smiled, slightly more softly than last time "—thanks for the invite, breaking you out of lock-up was fun and all, but I'm not in it to hurt people."

Amazingly, Erik found that he wasn't annoyed with being constantly interrupted. He was almost grateful to have the real reason he was here put off over and over again. "It's not a terrorist group, and I'm not here to recruit you to it." That was also fairly amazing, as Erik realized that, in all the time he'd had between realizing that Peter might well be his son and the present, he'd not once considered recruiting him to the Brotherhood. "Your…" Erik prayed that his voice would sound gentle instead of just raw "…you said that your mother had known a man who could control metal, didn't you?"

Peter nodded, silent. He stared Erik up and down, and for the life of him, Erik couldn't tell if Peter knew where he was going with this or not.

He had to broach the subject gently. That was what he had been telling himself the entire journey to this house in suburban Alexandria, if it did indeed turn out that Peter was his son, that Wanda was his daughter, that he had children, living children. Erik had enough emotional awareness, even after ten years of solitary confinement, to know that rushing headlong into this was likely not going to end well. And he had managed to broach the subject gently, so far.

"I'm your father."

But eventually, he was bound to screw up.

Peter gaped at him. This was probably the most surprising thing that had happened so far—Peter had up to now always had a witty remark ready to fire; Erik didn't think he would ever see him slack-jawed. But then, this was his son, whom he had known, in accumulated time, for probably three hours, at the most. He didn't really know much anything about him.

"No…" Peter faltered, looking almost stricken. "No way."

"Go ask Marya," Erik said quietly. He had expected skepticism. "She'll tell you who I am."

Though he likely had to wait no longer than a minute for Peter to return, the waiting was unbearable. Was this what it felt like for Peter, every hour and every minute of the day? As Erik stood in the middle of the basement, staring down at the bare concrete floor, searching with his senses for every metal object in the house just to pass the time, the air seemed to grow uncomfortably warm and still.

When Peter sped back down the stairs, he stopped to, once again, gape open-mouthed at Erik. "So…"

"So…" Erik felt his head begin to pound.

"So why now?" Peter's eyes were very wide; he would have to be about eighteen by now, but suddenly, he looked to Erik's eyes much younger. "If Mom says you're my dad, I believe her. But why show up after all this time?"

"I didn't even know you _existed_ until the day we met," Erik pointed out, exasperation flavoring his words for the first time, though he wasn't sure if he was exasperated with Peter so much as he was exasperated with this whole situation. And himself. "You _or_ Wanda. And even if by chance I had found out before then, as you will recall, I just spent the last decade in prison. I wasn't allowed visitors; I wasn't allowed phone calls, or letters. There wasn't a great deal I could have done about it in there."

Peter nodded swiftly. He looked away, a remarkably hard expression—and suddenly, Erik saw a bit of himself in the boy where he hadn't seen any before—flitting over his face before vanishing. "Okay, yeah, that makes sense," he muttered, and whether it _actually_ made sense, Erik didn't know.

Erik decided to try a different tack. "Marya told me your sister ran away."

This earned him another nod, much swifter than the last and looking more like the spasm of someone having convulsions than anything else. "Yeah," Peter said shortly, still not looking Erik in the eye. "It was… Well, it was hard." But then, his head snapped up and he was staring at Erik so hard that he expected to feel his skin start to burn. "You wanna go look for her?"

"What?" Erik had meant to ask why Wanda had run away in the first place, but all memory of the question was knocked out of his head by this abrupt twist the conversation had taken.

Suddenly, Peter was grinning. "I've been meaning to go look for her once I finished up school, but let's face it, school's boring and Wanda's way more important than school anyways." His eyes narrowed. "Come on, man; you came _this_ —" he held his thumb and his forefinger about a millimeter apart "—close to CIA central just to see me, and you don't even want to recruit me to your terrorist group. You can't tell me you don't want to see Wanda, too."

Erik raised an eyebrow. "Do you even have any idea where she is?" he protested. "The world's a bigger place than you seem to think it is." But he already knew he had lost. If mutants were disappearing again, he didn't want Wanda to be one of them. Even if he had never met her.

Peter shrugged. "Wanda always talked about wanting to see San Francisco."

"Do you even have a car?"

"Yes."

"That _isn't_ Marya's?"

"Still yes."

Erik sighed. "Alright, then. But if you want to do this, we're going to have to stay off the interstates for most of the trip." He wasn't entirely sure how he'd managed to throw up his hands before Peter could protest, but he would count it as good fortune. "I have been attempting to make contact with some of my old 'acquaintances', only to find that most of them have gone missing. I would like to visit those whom I did manage to contact, and if possible figure out those who have disappeared. I would," he assured Peter, "also like to ensure that Wanda is not among those mutants who have gone missing since the end of the Vietnam War."

Suddenly, Peter was standing at the top of the stairs. "Then what are we waiting for?!"

Even if Peter wasn't his son, Erik would have to admit that he owed the boy a great deal for breaking him out of prison. Erik was _not_ the sort of person who liked being in someone else's debt. But he sighed again, and wondered exactly what he was getting himself into, before following.

-0-0-0-

Marya was strangely accepting of the idea that her nephew and foster-son was going to take off on a cross-country road-trip with the father he'd just found out was his father to find the sister he'd not seen in a year.

"Did you pack your duffel bag?"

"Yeah, Mom!"

"Is there anything other than Twinkies and Ding Dongs in there?"

"Umm, there's a lot of them…"

"Go pack it again."

Peter came back into the living room, and after Marya inspected the contents of his bag, she nodded. "Now go say goodbye to your sister." When Peter zoomed up the stairs to the second floor only to reappear three seconds later, she pointed up the stairs and said, " _Properly_ this time, Peter." He grinned sheepishly and vanished again.

While they waited for Peter to come back down from saying his goodbyes to Lorna, Erik chanced a glance in Marya's direction. She was leaning against the wall, gnawing on her thumbnail the way he remembered her doing as a girl. "I'm surprised you're just letting him go with me," he murmured.

Marya started, as though she'd forgotten he was in the room (Erik felt vaguely insulted, but saved the feeling for later). She brushed stray strands of hair out of her face, and shrugged. "I wanted him to stay in school so long as the government kept sending troops to Vietnam, but now… He nearly failed last year. He's already missed too many days this year, and yes, I know it's only September; the school's been threatening to expel him over his cutting school so much. And…" Marya narrowed her eyes. "…And I have been hearing things. Keeping my ear to the ground. He's… He's safer with you."

Just because he was curious, Erik asked, "What would you have done if someone with ill-intent had come looking for Peter?"

Her smile was not feral. It was absolutely _predatory_. "Why, Erik, don't you know that's what shotguns are for?" she said, as falsely sugary as saccharin.

Erik decided to let the topic drop.

Finally (after what must have been a long time for him), Peter came back down the stairs. He was very close to vibrating, he seemed so impatient to leave. "Okay, Munchkin knows where I'm heading, I promise I'll call, I promise I'll get Wanda to call when we find her, I love you—" he kissed Marya's cheek so fast that Erik wondered if Marya even felt it "—and I'll see you when I see you. Okay, bye!"

"Hang on, Peter." Marya dug a wad of bills out of her pocket. Peter's eyebrows shot up as she pressed them into his hand. "For gas and food. I don't know how far it will get you, but you—" she smiled, and managed to keep from smiling too bitterly "—have never had much trouble finding food even when you have no money, so… I love you too, _please_ remember to call, and good luck."

Peter squirmed when Marya kissed his cheek and squirmed even harder when she hugged him. Once she let go of him, he practically flew out the front door, duffel bag. Erik followed at a significantly more sedate pace. As he was crossing the threshold outside, Marya had one last thing to say. "Oh, Erik? I just want you to know that, while I'm glad that you're actually taking an interest in your kids, if you get Peter or Wanda involved in any of your terrorist schemes, I don't care how many stadiums you drop on my head—I will find you and I will slit your throat in your sleep."

Erik waved without looking back at her.

-0-0-0-

The car, the one that Peter actually owned and wasn't 'borrowing' from his foster mother, was an elderly Chevrolet Nova—Erik had never cared much about cars and wasn't sure if this was supposed to impress him or not. It was, of course, painted silver. Peter quickly confided that he and Wanda had bought it a year and a half ago for a very low price, due to the fact that it was what was politely referred to as a "beater." The twins had then spent many a weekend resuscitating, repairing, and all-around making the car "better." Again, Erik wasn't entirely sure if this was supposed to be impressive or not. But the car looked sturdy, looked like it could carry them from Alexandria to San Francisco (Or wherever Wanda might be, if Erik heard from one of his accounted-for contacts that she'd been sighted somewhere else on the continent).

He'd instructed Peter that they were heading first to Detroit, and that they would be taking the back roads, not the interstate. Peter wasn't terribly impressed by the idea that they were heading to Detroit by way of Indianapolis, but he got over it when he realized that he'd have the chance to check out the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; apparently he was a fan of the Indy 500. " _We're big into car racing_." By 'we're', Erik supposed Peter was referring to Wanda.

Peter… was a surprisingly good driver. Erik supposed he'd expected him to be a bad one, since the boy had a decided aversion to sitting still which Erik had noticed on more than one occasion. Driving was an activity that required a certain amount of single-mindedness; Peter didn't seem to have much in the way of that either. However, he did an admirable job paying attention to the road, to other cars, to traffic lights and road signs. Erik wondered if Peter's mutant abilities didn't help with that.

(He also began to wonder, after a while, if Peter wasn't trying to impress him with how well he could drive. It was just a suspicion, of course. A suspicion informed by Peter trying and utterly failing to subtly sneak glances at him every time he came to a perfect stop in front of a traffic light or made a left hand turn from an intersection without crossing into the wrong lane.)

Regardless of that, Peter still managed to fidget, twitch, and squirm in the driver's seat of the car more than anyone Erik had ever witnessed drive a car. The car's young driver was constantly adjusting the air conditioning, the radio station, anything he could get his hands on. Erik wondered how long it would be before Peter jumped out of the driver's window just to see how long it would be before the car started spinning out of control without someone driving it.

If Erik had to use his powers to stabilize the car so he didn't die the ridiculously anticlimactic death of dying in a screaming car wreck, he was going to kill someone. Seriously. But not Peter, because hurting Peter would be unacceptable.

He knew he should have brought a book to read.

-0-0-0-

So far, so good. The trip was quiet, they hadn't been stopped by the police, and Peter hadn't wrapped the car around a tree. Peter… He'd been very quiet so far. Maybe he just felt like he needed to focus more on driving; Erik had known people like that. But it felt unnatural, somehow.

(He remembered another person who had fallen so unnaturally silent sometimes, usually when under extreme stress. He'd known Magda to go days without saying a word in the camp, not even to him.)

"Tell me about Wanda." He couldn't stand to frame it as a question. It seemed absurd that he should be asking someone, let alone his son, about what his own daughter was like. It seemed absurd that he shouldn't know. It still seemed absurd that he wouldn't know about his children until they were essentially adults, and the chance to raise them had passed him by.

Peter's gaze lit on him for a split-second before his voice filled up the interior of the car, drowning out the music playing on the radio. "Well damn, man, it's about time. I thought you'd never ask. I mean, come on; you find out you've got a daughter and you're not curious at all? So what d'you wanna know?"

Erik spread his hands—for a moment, the car shook, before he reined his powers back in and shook his head instead, trying to clear out cobwebs. "Anything you can tell me."

With that prompting, Peter launched into what felt like a thousand different anecdotes at once.

Wanda's mutant powers were, at best, ill-defined; no one in the Maximoff family had ever known what to call them. At a coin toss, Wanda always seemed to know if it was going to come up heads or tails. She was also a master at cheating at cards; she always knew what cards Peter was holding at any given time. When they were in tenth grade, Peter and Wanda had been picked on by a high school senior until, one afternoon, Wanda had glared at his car as he drove away until one of the back tires burst and the car had spun and spun and spun until it hit a lamp post.

Little Lorna had taken her first faltering steps with Wanda holding her hands, trailing closely after her to make sure that if she fell, comfort would be soon to follow. She'd scolded Peter for trying to scoop Lorna up before she could fall to the ground. _"How's she going to learn with you doing that?!"_ Wanda had asked, exasperated. When Peter relayed this part, he had adopted a high-pitched voice that Erik could only assume was supposed to be an approximation of his twin's. Somehow, he seriously doubted that Wanda sounded anything like a teenage boy practicing falsetto.

Wanda would drive Marya crazy by begging her to buy oranges from the grocery story only to do nothing with them but suck out the juice and refuse to eat the flesh. It was only when Marya had taught her how to candy the peel that she'd seen any use to oranges besides sucking out the juice.

And evidently, thanks to the combined efforts of the Maximoff twins, no door-to-door salesman within a fifty-mile radius was stupid enough to visit their house.

Bizarrely, Erik felt the faint stirrings of pride upon hearing that last detail.

"What does she look like?" There was no way Erik could think of to frame that as anything other than a question, even though it was even more absurd (and laughable, in a terrifying, painful, terrifyingly painful way, the way someone laughed when they realized that they'd had something dear to their heart stolen from them) that he shouldn't know what his own daughter looked like.

But Peter didn't laugh at him, didn't scoff, didn't mock. He just jerked his head towards the back seat. "I brought some pictures. They're in the duffel bag."

There was something metal in the duffel bag, though Erik wasn't quite sure what it was yet; thanks to that, it was easy enough to levitate the bag into his lap. He unzipped the duffel bag, and immediately saw where the metal inside of the bag had come from.

"Is this a flat iron?!" Erik asked Peter incredulously, taking the iron out of the bag and waving it around. "Why do you have a flat iron?!"

"Put that back in the bag!" Peter protested, glaring daggers at his father. "It's not mine!"

"You took Marya's flat iron? _Why?!"_

"It's not Mom's, either! It's Wanda's! She used to straighten her hair sometimes and she didn't take it with her when she left! Stop waving it around; you'll break it! I got that for her when we turned fifteen; now put it back!"

Erik sighed gustily, but did indeed—carefully—place the iron back inside of the bag. "You know, when someone is planning to run away, they usually pack more sensible items than flat irons."

"Weren't you digging through my stuff looking for _pictures_?" Peter asked pointedly.

Erik returned to rummaging through the duffel bag. There were, predictably, clothes, which he left alone, and a few more mashed-up Twinkies and Zingers that Peter had managed to sneak past Marya (No Ding Dongs, though). Eventually, he found a few photographs, held together with a paperclip. Erik slid the paperclip off of the photographs and stared at the one on top. He saw a teenage girl with long, curly dark hair ("Mom curled her hair for picture day; it doesn't normally look quite that… _big_."). Where Erik could see neither himself nor Magda in Peter, he saw them both in Wanda. She had the soft, ill-defined features of someone who was still growing into her face, but nonetheless possessed a sharp, narrow chin, delicately pointed nose and a mouth that quirked downwards even when she was trying to smile. Erik looked into her eyes…

…And was startled to see his own eyes staring back. His own intent, piercing gaze, restless, dissatisfied with the world.

"Is this your most recent picture of Wanda?" Erik heard himself asking.

Peter glanced at it and nodded; his shoulders tensed up slightly. "Yeah, it is. It's a couple of years old, but after that she wouldn't let people take pictures of her anymore. She… She wasn't happy that day."

Women usually stopped growing before men did; Wanda likely didn't look all that different now than she did then, unless she'd done something drastic like bleach her hair or something like that. Erik slid this photograph to the bottom of the pile (and in no way was he doing it so he wouldn't have to see his daughter's gaze—so reminiscent of his own—any longer) and began looking over the others.

There was a photo of Peter and Wanda, a few years younger, it looked like, with a tiny girl whom he assumed was Lorna. Lorna was wearing a frilly, bright pink costume dress covered in rhinestones and was grinning from ear to ear. For some reason, the twins both wore sheepish, uncomfortable expressions and didn't particularly look like they wanted to be in the picture.

There was a photo, again of both of the twins, as small children themselves, blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The date on the back of the photo was 1960—the twins' fifth birthday. Erik didn't see Marya—she must have been holding the camera—but he recognized a few other faces in the background.

There was a picture of Wanda from 1962 in a flower girl's dress, holding a white wicker basket and beaming brightly. "One of Mom's cousins got married," Peter informed him. "I was the ring bearer; I didn't bring that picture. No loss, really. I lost the ring; it took hours to find it. Nobody's let me do anything in a wedding since. That was right before Wanda got her powers."

Below that, there was a picture dated ' _1957, June_ '—Magda with the twins. Peter was trying to climb over her shoulder; Wanda sat sedately in her lap. Magda was smiling brightly, but it didn't quite reach her eyes, which looked fond, but tired. Erik felt his stomach swoop just a touch to look at her, but the sensation wasn't pleasant as it had been, what felt like a lifetime ago. He slid the photo to the bottom of the stack more quickly than he had the others.

Then, Erik came to a photograph that gave him pause. It was dated 1966, when Wanda and Peter would have been about eleven. They appeared to be standing in their backyard, and were wearing a decidedly odd assortment of clothes. Peter was wearing swimming goggles and what looked like a blue-gray leotard, over which was a silver jacket that was clearly the predecessor of the jacket he seemed so fond of these days. Wanda wore a sleeveless red dress, red tights and opera gloves, a glittery masquerade mask that covered the upper half of her face adorned with green and purple feathers, and on top of all that, a red beach towel pulled around her neck like a cape, fastened with a costume brooch.

"What's this?" Erik held the photo so that Peter could see it, eyebrows raised quizzically.

When Peter saw it, he grinned hugely. "I remember that! Mom took a color photo of that specially, said she wanted to remember what we looked like in color."

"Why are you dressed like that?"

"Heh." Peter laughed sheepishly. "You know, we thought we looked so cool when we did that, but _damn_ we looked stupid." He cast a sideways glance at Erik. "Guess I finally know where we got the sucky fashion sense from. You and that god-awful super villain get-up."

"I'm not trying to set a fashion trend," Erik rejoined, glaring lightly at him. "And I hardly think that trying to keep mutantkind from being massacred by the human population is the behavior of a super villain."

Peter rolled his eyes. "Whatever. Keep saying that, keep doing stuff that makes the Joker, Lex Luthor and Vandal Savage look like small-time shoplifters. Anyways, don't you want to know why we were dressed like that? I'll tell you.

"Me and Wanda, we always liked superhero comics and the cartoons, the Superman and Batman stuff and all that." Peter quirked a smile, but it wasn't a particularly happy one. "When Wanda got her powers, we started playing superheroes for real. One of us would be the hero, the other would be the villain. It was kinda like cops and robbers, 'cept with superheroes and one of us could make stuff break if she wanted to. I remember how happy she was when I got my powers. That—" he pointed at the picture "—kind of turned into Superman versus Flash. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver." Peter's gaze grew distant; his hands clenched down tight over the steering wheel. "I think it was probably the only time she was ever really happy using her powers."

That didn't sound like something that boded well. Erik stared down at the photo of the eleven-year-old twins, ran his thumb over their faces. "Pietro…"

"The name's 'Peter,'" Peter asserted, visibly disturbed. "Come on, don't tell me you're forgetting my name already; that's not supposed to happen until you're like, in your seventies."

"Why did Wanda run away?" he asked quietly. The answer? Erik suspected that he already knew the answer was, but the question bore asking anyways.

Peter shrugged. He stared straight ahead, into the rearview mirrors, anywhere but at Erik. "Wanda always seemed… Well, she never seemed completely happy with her life, even before she got her powers. It always felt like she was waiting for something, though it's not like I ever really found out _what_ she was waiting for. I'm not sure she knew, either. Sometimes…" Now, Peter did look at him, his eyes hard. "…Sometimes, I think she was waiting for you to show up. When we were little, we used to play these games where we tried to guess where you were and what you were doing. We used to put bets on when we thought you might show up. Once Wanda got her powers, I always thought that if she placed her bet on when you'd show up, you would." Peter looked away. "She was never right."

Erik shut his eyes tight, trying not to remember what he had been doing while Peter and Wanda—his children—had been placing bets on when their absentee father would, at last, come looking for them. _I never regretted any of it._

 _But I regret_ this _, don't I?_

"Once she got her powers…" Erik listened to Peter as he went on. "…It wasn't… Well, it wasn't good. She couldn't control them, not at first, and even the last I saw of her, she couldn't control them all that well. She might be trying to make a glass tip over and end up flipping the table instead. She got to where she was afraid to use her powers. She was afraid…" Peter's voice had gotten oddly high-pitched. "…She was afraid of herself. What she might do. Wanda could always take care of herself—she was better at that than me—but she always seemed really tense. Like I said, she was afraid of herself. It wore her down. And when she got mad, really mad, stuff would just break and fall over and blow up all over the place."

That sounded more familiar to Erik than he would have liked.

"And I don't think it helped when I got my powers." Peter let out a small, quavering breath. "Wanda got her powers when she was seven; I got mine when I was ten. You know, three-year gap, and she spent all of that time thinking that she was by herself, that she was alone. It didn't help her, thinking she was alone; it didn't help her at all." Somehow, that sounded familiar too. "At first, when I found out how fast I could go, she was really happy, but when she realized how different our powers were—she had something we didn't know how to identify, something she couldn't really control, and I had no trouble controlling what I could do at all—it made her angry. She'd gotten stuck with her weird powers, and I had powers like a superhero's." Peter sighed heavily. "It didn't help.

"And then she got expelled from school."

At that, Erik's eyes snapped open (The world suddenly seemed far too bright). He stared at Peter, feeling confused for some reason, though he had no idea why he should feel particularly confused. "Why was she expelled?"

"Vandalism."

"Vandalism," Erik repeated blankly.

"Yeah, I know!" Peter laughed humorlessly. "Everybody expected me to get expelled first, not her." When he caught Erik's still-blank stare, he elaborated, "Look, I told you, Wanda had trouble controlling her powers. When she got mad or upset, stuff broke. And you know, it's pretty impossible to avoid getting mad or upset at school, especially with all the assholes in our high school. At first, it wasn't anything anyone could really pin on Wanda. The leg on somebody's chair would break while they were sitting in it, a cafeteria tray would crack while someone was holding it, the seams on their book bags would break and all their binders would come spilling out. Like I said, nothing anyone could pin on Wanda. But if you really think the teachers missed the fact that all of this was happening to people Wanda had just had fights with or to people who had picked on her, you've got another thing coming.

"And then…" Peter ran a hand through his silver-gray hair (and if Erik hadn't seen pictures of him as a small child with that hair color, he would have sworn Peter was dyeing his hair), making it appear even more unkempt than it already was. "Then there was this time when she was alone in the gym after school. I don't know what she was doing in there; I just know that she was there. She lost control and, well, a _lot_ of stuff got broken. She didn't mean to do any of it—she never _meant_ to do any of it, except when she did—but a lot of stuff still got broken. And here's the thing." He fixed Erik with another hard stare. "The system doesn't care a whole lot about kids like us to start with. Kids like us, foster kids with 'behavioral problems'—" Peter sounded out the words as though he was saying something more vulgar than he would ever normally countenance saying "—the system doesn't give a rat's ass about us. Kids like us don't get second chances. Second chances are for rich kids. So Wanda got expelled. The school had gotten the word out; nowhere else would take her. And from then on out, it was countdown to that moment when Wanda would have all she could take and couldn't take no more."

Listening to Peter's tale, Erik wasn't entirely sure what to feel. There was anger, yes, and sadness, and if there was guilt there too, that was only natural, and he told himself that he didn't need to look into that too closely.

Wanda was angry, confused? Erik knew anger. He knew confusion. She felt isolated? Erik knew isolation as well. The emotions were close kin to him, had always been. _If I had been there…_

But Erik wasn't sure what to say to Peter. When Charles was confronted with a story like this one (and he _had_ been, Erik knew that; he'd borne witness to it himself), he would usually spout something he thought sounded very wise, but inevitably left the person he was talking to looking at him in mild confusion. Occasionally, Charles had managed to hit the nail on the head, but frankly, there had been occasions when Erik suspected that all that had saved Charles from getting punched in the face (usually by Alex or sometimes, surprisingly, Sean) was that what he said was so obviously well-intentioned that it was difficult to stay angry with him. Charles had always meant well. Erik missed that, in the life where he was once again on his own, without Charles. But then, he'd missed a lot about Charles.

He put his hand on Peter's arm. "We will find her," Erik said quietly.

To his surprise, Peter actually grinned at him. "I know we will."

(Erik tucked the photo of Peter and Wanda in their 'costumes' into his coat pocket. He was trying to be surreptitious, and failed miserably. Peter caught him doing it and grinned even more widely than before.)

-0-0-0-

"Pietro—"

"It's still Peter."

"—I'm going to turn the radio to a news station."

"What? Come on!"

"It won't kill you to go without music for a few minutes, even an hour."

"Yeah, but what about you?"

"I don't follow."

"Oh, come on, man, you've missed like, ten years worth of new music! I know you weren't getting music in that cell of yours! Pink Floyd, Queen, The Who, The Moody Blues, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles! You've got a ton of catching up to do!"

"I didn't miss The Beatles, _or_ Simon and Garfunkel. The latter wasn't always known by the name that they are now, and the former are highly overrated."

"…Wow. Just… Wow."

-0-0-0-

Erik hadn't known that Magda was pregnant again when they had separated. How could he? She wasn't showing, might not have even known herself, and if she had, she certainly hadn't told him. Would that have changed things?

He looked down at some of the photos of the twins, those he'd not yet put back into Peter's duffel bag. Their fifth birthday, the picture Marya had taken of them their first day of school, a baby picture in which, for the life of him, Erik could not tell which child was which. This one, the oldest, had been taken in black and white—he couldn't even tell what color their blankets were.

Over the years, the long years, he'd forgotten how to be a parent. Perhaps more accurately, Erik had forced himself to forget how to be a parent, how to be someone who had a family and a life that didn't involve tracking Shaw down and making him _pay_. He had devoted himself to that exclusively, spent years doing very little to nothing that didn't involve furthering his goal of killing Shaw. If he had found out about Wanda and Peter in the years between his and Magda's separation and his imprisonment, if he had known…

_What would I have done, at that?_

Erik would have liked to say that, if he'd discovered that he had children during those years, of course he would have taken custody of them. He would have liked to say that of course he would have taken responsibility as their father, of course he would have done his best to care for them and raise them.

But he wasn't sure. He really wasn't. There had been days (and weeks and, sometimes, months) when all he could do was fantasize about how Shaw would scream when he drove that coin through his head and out the other side. The man he had been then would not have wanted anything distracting him from his quest for revenge. Children, small children who needed looking after, they were the ultimate distraction from such things.

And if, by some chance, Erik had found out about the twins, had taken custody of them, he would not have been a good father. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. He had been so consumed with killing Shaw, and a life like that had no room for children. Even at their unhappiest, Peter and Wanda had been better off without him. Erik could admit that, even if it did feel like the bullet that had grazed his neck, courtesy of Raven.

He glanced over at Peter, who, having won the battle over the radio station, had gone back to driving in peace and silence. For once, Peter seemed to be entirely ignorant of his scrutiny. Erik knew that his children had been better off without him, that he wouldn't have made a good father, but he prayed, he hoped, that Peter would never realize that.

-0-0-0-

"So, how'd you and Mother meet?"

They weren't too far from the border with West Virginia now. Unfortunately, driving through the George Washington National Forest had necessitated getting on to I-64; it was, as far as Erik knew, the most straightforward route through the forest. However, they'd likely be able to get off of it not long after crossing the state border. Erik wasn't sure why, but he'd feel better about all of this when he got out of Virginia.

Needless to say, he'd not been expecting a question like this.

Erik stared at Peter, who reacted as though he thought Erik hadn't understood. "I mean our birth mother. For the record, 'Mother' is our mother, 'Mom' is Aunt Marya, 'Munchkin' is Lorna, and 'that jackass from Toledo' is that guy Mom was dating a few years ago, Lorna's dad—don't worry, me and Wanda scared him off; he really was a jackass, not nearly good enough for our Mom. Anyways, how _did_ you and Mother meet? I don't know how long you've been running around doing terrorist super villain stuff, but that doesn't sound like the sort of lifestyle that leaves a lot of room for romance. Unless…" Peter's eyes lit up conspiratorially. "Mother was a _retired_ terrorist super villain! Now it all makes sense!"

That was not the sort of thing that bore dignifying with a response. Especially considering that Erik suspected that Peter had said all of that nonsense about Magda being a 'retired terrorist super villain' just to get a reaction out of him. "Your mother and I met in the Warsaw Ghetto," he said shortly, cutting off any other wild speculations Peter could possibly come up with.

"Oh… I… umm," Peter stammered, immediately sensing that he'd hit a nerve, and a raw one at that. "I'm sorry," he muttered, regaining control of his tongue. He was still stammering, just a bit. "I should have realized… Mom's got this weird spot on her arm; she told me she got the tattoo removed when she moved here. Mother did the same thing with hers." When he got no immediate answer (at least not one that came fast enough to ease his troubled conscience), he glanced nervously at Erik. "Look, I really am _sorry_ , okay?"

There were a number of things that it occurred to Erik to say, each one of them sitting on some different end of the sliding scale of 'gentle reproof' versus 'stinging rebuke.' However, what came out of his mouth instead was a weary "It's not your fault."

Peter stared at him with huge dark eyes.

Anyone in this situation would have realized that Peter wanted to hear more than just the simple explanation of the physical location where his parents met. It was clear Marya hadn't given him the story; how much must Peter have wondered about this, as he was growing up? "After…" After the camp, after Shaw, after he ceased to be a number and started being Erik Lehnsherr again (Though there were times when, remembering his name as it had sounded out of Shaw's lips, Erik almost wished he could seek the anonymity of the number on his arm again). "…After the end of the war, your mother's family took me in. I had none of my own left. I already knew Magda, and her parents already knew me."

The Maximoffs were a huge family, the type that used a field rather than a house to host family reunions. Like every family who had been targeted during the Holocaust, they had lost some of their number, but they had still come out a large family. They, Magda's parents, at least, were aware of the 'interest' Shaw had taken in him. "Schmidt's pet", he'd been called in the camp, spoken with scorn by the guards and pity by the inmates. Even then, he didn't like to think that it had been pity that had motivated Magda's parents to take him in. He told himself that it was because he was their daughter's friend; Erik felt a little better about all of this when he'd realized that he wasn't the only orphan the extended Maximoff family had adopted after the end of the war.

"We married a few years later," Erik went on, deliberately as flat and detached as he could manage. Almost… He could almost believe that he wasn't hearing the undercurrents of anger rise in his own voice, rising like a river beating against a dam. "We settled in Vinnytsia, in Ukraine. Back when I was a different man."

He _had_ tried to move on, at first. He _had_ tried to put what Shaw had done to him and his behind him. Erik had tried that for years, tried living his life without revenge, without rage, without his powers. Only later had Erik realized how fragile that peace had been.

"The people there found me out." He cooled his rage, knowing it would not go well if he ended up crashing the car. "There was… an incident." A fire, and screams. Then more screams, and more, and more. "We never formally divorced, but your mother and I separated after that. I never saw her again."

Magda shrank from his touch when he had tried to embrace her, tried in vain to comfort her. She screamed at him to stay away from her. Screamed at him and fled into the night. Her face, transfixed in horror, was the last he ever saw of her. The sight of her face, transfixed in horror, had brought him out of his rage, but she was gone, and he had nothing left but rage. (It was a year before Erik realized that it wasn't that fact that he could move metal that had terrified her so much that night.)

Magda had told him to stay away from her, so Erik listened, and obeyed that demand for five years, before, at last, he decided to try to find her. He never did, knew now that she had already been dead when he put his search for Shaw on hold to try to find his missing wife. Erik tried to look up Magda's family, those who hadn't already relocated to America, in the hopes that she might be staying with one of them or that they'd know where she was, but had never found them, either. It was as though that large family that had once treated him as one of their own had vanished off the face of the earth. He eventually found himself standing in the empty house of one of Magda's maternal aunts, dusty and filled with mold and neglect.

The revelation that even if, by some chance, Magda was willing to accept him back into her life, even if she was willing to let him be her husband again, she wouldn't recognize him for the man he had become: a moment of terrible, unforgiving clarity. Charles, if he ever heard this story, would probably be disappointed to realize that this moment of clarity hadn't ended in Erik realizing that his desire for revenge had destroyed every good thing he had left in his life. Well, Charles was only half-right. Erik _had_ realized what his desire for revenge had done to him.

In all those long years, Erik had never thought about what he would do after he killed Shaw. Killing his tormentor was, in itself, the endgame, and always had been. He was like a ghost that had been given flesh again to resolve its unfinished business. After he killed Shaw, he would be like a puppet with its strings cut. After he killed Shaw, he would really have no reason to be alive anymore; it wouldn't be suicide that got him so much as overwhelming apathy. (And it wasn't until, of all people, Shaw gave him a new reason to stay alive that he thought differently.) Erik suspected that Charles knew this, suspected it to be a large part of the reason Charles begged him repeatedly not to kill Shaw—he was trying to expand his lifespan. _I don't want to lose you, I don't want you to throw your life away_ ; his words had had all the stamp of that.

In that quiet, empty house, Erik had shed the name that Magda's parents had gifted him with, when he came under their care. They had tried to give him a name and a life that didn't bear the taint of the camps or of Klaus Schmidt. He was grateful to them for that. But he had only ever been 'Magnus' to them, 'Magnus' to Magda and her parents, and with them gone, so was he. He was a different man.

Peter looked at him, lips quivering strangely; for one horrible moment, Erik was sure that he was going to start crying. He had no idea what to do with tears. But instead, he said, "Okay."

And then: "And now you're in love with this Xavier guy."

" _What?!"_

Obviously, Peter had misunderstood the motivation behind that _'What_ ', because he waved a hand (never taking the other off the steering wheel), and assured him, "Look, you swing both ways, that's fine. So do I! I ain't got no room to judge. And I don't think you're betraying Mother's memory or anything like that, you don't have to worry about that."

Erik glared at him. "We are _not_ in love." _Anymore_ , the ever-treacherous voice in the back of his mind chimed in.

Peter rolled his eyes so far back in his head that all Erik could see were the whites. "Oh, please," he scoffed. "The first thing he does upon seeing you for the first time in ten years is punch you in the face, and all you do is smile up at him and talk about how glad you are to see him. Then you spend the whole time we're in the car staring at the back of his head. Do you know how long that was? It was a really long time! We were in that car forever and you stared at him the whole time. Couldn't take your eyes off him!"

"We are not—"

"Do you know what I was seeing in the Pentagon?" It seemed impossible to dissuade Peter once he'd gotten on a roll. "I was seeing what I would swear to God was a couple who had obviously gone through the nastiest break-up in the past century, only to discover that they still had feelings for each other, and one of them—" at this, he pointed at Erik "—was a lot more comfortable with the idea than the other."

At this, Erik could only glare at Peter again. "Pietro—"

"Still Peter, man."

"My love life," Erik told him in an ever-so-slightly raised voice, " _non-existent as it is_ , is none of your concern. Do you understand?"

Peter nodded entirely too meekly for Erik's liking, but short of actually contradicting him, he couldn't do a thing about it.

It got him thinking, remembering.

Erik could remember, on occasion, spotting a woman or a man at the bar or in a restaurant or just walking down the street, and finding them attractive. At first, guilt over what felt like betraying Magda had kept him back. After that, it had been the knowledge that there was no room in his life for anyone else, that there was no room in a life hunting down Shaw (and that would have no meaning left to it once Shaw was dead) for anyone he could love. On the rare occasions that he actually spoke to and interacted with these people, Erik usually skipped town not long afterwards, before it could become anything but a vague, ill-defined attraction.

Against his better judgment, he hadn't done that with Charles. Charles was the first other mutant he had ever met, the first person who, in all his time hunting Shaw, could tell him he wasn't alone and mean every word of it. He hadn't skipped town when he realized that he found Charles attractive, hadn't skipped town when he realized that the feeling was mutual. He'd accepted help for the first time, had stayed, and for a while, he'd felt… like he was home. Even when he knew that it wouldn't last, that this would end up being just as transient as every other city and apartment and hotel room he'd ever stayed in, he had managed to make himself half-believe that maybe this time would be different. For a day or two, Erik could actually see his life beyond killing Shaw.

But then, he'd found out where Shaw was, and all of that had vanished. It wasn't the first time he'd managed to let his rage destroy the relationship he had with someone he loved.

And now, he still found himself plagued with all those conflicting feelings.

(Charles had just looked so _beautiful_ when he smiled.)

-0-0-0-

Peter was fumbling with his goggles again. He kept sliding them off, on, off, on, then off and on again. Erik could only suppose that he was at last growing bored with doing nothing but driving. After all, why do one thing when you can do four, or five or six, practically at the same time? He had to admit, Peter's mutation probably allowed him to get much more done in the space of the day than most others (Now, if only one could convince Peter of the value of this).

Erik remembered what he had thought the first time he'd seen Peter wear those goggles: _What, are we going to have to swim through a shark tank to get out; I think that's a bit too 'James Bond' for my captors, even at their worst moments._ An absurd thought, he would admit, but he was also still reeling from moving at speeds he still _never_ wished to occupy again.

He had to ask: "Why do you wear those goggles?"

Peter looked at him, startled, as though he'd forgotten that Erik was in the car with him. By now, they had settled into an almost companionable silence, filled only with the strains of _"Home where my thought's escaping, Home where my music's playing, Home where my love lies waiting silently for me_." "Mom makes me," he said simply, elaborating only when Erik's eyebrows shot up as if to say 'Oh, you're blaming _her_ for your questionable fashion choices.' "Trust me, there's a good reason."

"Then tell me."

At that, Peter's face actually reddened, embarrassment coloring his features. "One of the first times I went running after I got my powers I, uh, well, I got a bug in my eye."

"That…" Erik found himself wincing, sympathy coming up unbidden.

"Yeah." Peter laughed ruefully. "It was pretty nasty. It also hurt a lot, which is why Mom made me wear the goggles. She said that if I was going to be running around that fast, I needed to protect my eyes. Well, she also told me that I needed to keep my mouth shut and for pretty much the same reason, but I'm not as good at that."

"So I noticed."

"Hey!" But Peter's voice was devoid of any real anger. He stared at Erik out of the corner of his eye, mouth quirking downwards in a light frown. "Mom's always tried to look out for us, even when we gave her grief. I remember how freaked she got when I turned eighteen—when I got old enough to be drafted," he explained, and Erik winced again, but for an entirely different reason. "Mom doesn't like war to start with, and I guess she'd been hearing some bad shit about what was going down in Vietnam. She actually told me to _run_ if my number came up! Seriously! First time she'd ever _encouraged_ me to break the law," Peter muttered, and fell silent.

Marya had said that she was 'hearing things' which, given the context, likely had something to do with mutants, maybe even what Trask had been doing to them. Erik wondered exactly how much she had known, where she had gotten her information from. She'd always been like that, seeming to know more than it was possible for her to know. Maybe she was a mutant too, a telepath, and her telepathy was just more subtle than Charles's or Emma's. Alright, so she probably wasn't a mutant. But sometimes, Erik still had to question where Marya was getting her information from.

"Parents are like that," Erik said quietly, and set himself to staring out the passenger side window. He didn't look at Peter.

-0-0-0-

Eventually, they did have to stop at a gas station. The Nova got good mileage (Erik didn't know whether this was typical of the car or part of the "improvements" Peter had talked about), but the gas tank wasn't bottomless, and besides, apart from the few snack cakes Peter had managed to sneak into his bag, they had no food.

Peter went in to pay for the gas and to pick up some food; Erik didn't want to risk being spotted and recognized, and Peter could get in and out a lot faster than he could.

And, almost predictably, Peter came back with a bag stuffed full of snack foods, and another stuffed full of sodas and water bottles.

Erik inspected the contents of the bag full of food, and sighed slightly. It was full of granola bars and chocolate bars, bags of trail mix and M&M's, bags of peanuts and sunflower seeds, honey buns, and yes, Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Zingers, Ho Hos, and Sno Balls. His son, evidently, was determined to turn himself into a walking advertisement for Hostess. Not that he was going to complain about the contents. Erik had spent enough years of his life on the run (and in a concentration camp, and in the ghetto) to have adopted an attitude of 'Eat what you've got when you get it', and dietary laws were discarded along the way. However…

"Did you pay for all of this?" Erik asked suspiciously, indicating both the bag full of food and the bag full of soda and water.

"I paid for the gas," Peter said, looking remarkably nonchalant and not-guilty for someone who had just divested a convenience store of what was probably half its stock of sweets. "It cost me an arm and a leg; I don't think losing all this stuff'll hurt 'em very much." When he caught Erik's stern look, he held his hands up defensively. "Don't give me that look! You drop stadiums on presidents and you want to get on to me for shoplifting?!"

"Using your powers to shoplift is remarkably petty." _Is this how Charles feels when one of his students—if he has any again at this point—misuses their powers?_

"And, again, pretty small-time compared to what you do with yours."

"It's beneath you."

_This has to be how Charles feels._

Peter drew a deep breath. "Look, I need to eat a lot because of my mutation, stuff high in fat and calories and protein and stuff like that." When faced with a skeptical look, he added, "Seriously! I lost fifteen pounds the month I got my powers! Mom thought I was dying and kept dragging me to all these different doctors!"

Erik rubbed his forehead. "Pietro—"

"Seriously, it's still Peter, man."

"If you are lying to me…"

"I'm _not_."

They stared at each other for a long moment. Erik could see no lie in Peter's eyes—that, or the boy was a better liar than he gave him credit for. "Alright." Peter grinned. "But next time, we get some food with _substance_ , and we pay for it."

Having won yet another battle, Peter seemed willing to concede this point. "Sure, sure."

-0-0-0-

It was starting to get dark; the shadows of the trees were long and deep, and Peter had switched on his headlamps. He had also been persuaded to switch the radio to a news station for the time being.

"… _And the search for mutant terrorist Erik Lehnsherr, otherwise known as Magneto, remains ongoing. Also ongoing is the search for the man who aided him in his escape."_ Peter's hands tensed on the steering wheel again. _"Though the identity of Lehnsherr's accomplice remains unknown, he is described as a young mutant with gray hair and the ability to move at superhuman speeds."_

Peter looked like he was going to be sick. Erik thought it prudent to turn the radio off.

-0-0-0-

"I don't want to kill people," Peter said very suddenly.

This, after he'd not said a word or taken his eyes off the road for half an hour. Erik had expected him to break into hysterics when he finally did speak, but asides from a slightly strained quality to his voice, he sounded remarkably calm. (Of course, it didn't occur to him that the fact that Peter _sounded_ calm wasn't necessarily a good thing.)

"What brought this on?" Erik asked, perplexed.

Peter shrugged; his shoulders seemed to vibrate. "Well, you got to the point where you were willing to kill people, didn't you? And you didn't start out that way, did you? You didn't start out as someone willing to kill people; you had to get to that point. And now I'm, like, I'm on the run. Like Dillinger, man." He began to breathe very hard. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want to kill people. I don't want…"He trailed off, sucking in shallow breaths and shaking like a pine tree in a thunderstorm.

Erik looked him over, catching sight especially of Peter's too-bright eyes; he really was going to start crying if he didn't say something soon. "Yes, you're right. I didn't start out as someone who was willing to kill." In the years before, in the years between the war and the hunt. "I had to become that, just like everyone else."

Apparently he had failed in the 'comfort your child so he doesn't break down crying while he's driving' department, because Peter's eyes, if that was even possible, grew even brighter, and Erik could clearly see tears forming around the corners. "You don't have to kill anyone if you don't want to. I would never ask you to," he assured him.

That was actually the truth, surprisingly enough. Erik still had the same opinion on the idea of recruiting Peter and Wanda: it wasn't a good idea, he absolutely _wasn't_ going to do it, and he did not want them on the frontlines. He had no interest in recruiting children, no interest in risking their lives. Erik had seen children shot, seen them killed, and he never wanted to see that again.

Peter didn't appear terribly comforted by this either. _What would Charles say_? Erik wondered desperately. He pushed aside the suspicion that, at this point, Charles would have no interest in helping him and would only sit back to watch the fireworks. "Everything's going to be fine, Pietro," he said awkwardly, just as awkwardly patting the boy's shoulder.

Peter nodded and sucked in another breath that, nonetheless, sounded steadier than the ones he'd been taking before. "Umm… Why do you keep calling me 'Pietro?'" Peter asked, in a smaller voice than Erik would have liked. "That's really not my name, you know."

Erik didn't quite have an answer for him. At least, he didn't have an answer that would have allowed him to leave the car at any point in time with his dignity intact.

-0-0-0-

Peter's driving was starting to take a turn for the worse. Erik couldn't tell if it was because of the radio report or just because of the time of night. They needed to find somewhere to pull over, and soon. Sleeping in the car would be a better solution than finding a hotel room; at least, sleeping in a hotel wasn't going to be an option every night. Peter was a—still surprisingly—good driver, at least for a teenager who couldn't have more than a couple of years of driving experience under his belt, but the truth of the matter was that he had been driving all day, and had to be tired. Had to be nervous, after what he'd heard on the radio.

"Pull over. I'll drive the rest of the way until we find somewhere to pull off."

"No thanks, I'm good."

"You're _not_ good. You keep weaving. You're speeding."

"What? Oh, yeah." A strained laugh. "Sometimes I've really got to concentrate to keep from overdoing it with the accelerator. You should hear how Wanda talks when I do that."

"I mean it. You're tired; it happens to everyone. I can drive."

"No, you really can't. Do you even have a driver's license? One that didn't expire while you were in prison? I don't think they give driver's licenses to terrorists; hate to burst your bubble."

There was no convincing him. Erik supposed he was just going to have take control of the car if it looked like Peter was going to hit something—or someone.

-0-0-0-

Inevitably, Peter got stopped by the police.

It had started with the flash of blue lights behind them, dazzling and too-bright in the darkness. Neither Peter nor Erik was stupid enough to think that trying to outrun the police on roads unfamiliar to the driver was going to end well, so Peter pulled over and rolled down his window. The police officer took Peter's driver's license back to his car to examine it. Erik, having never been arrested on a traffic violation in America, didn't know if this was normal or not. Peter didn't seem to know, either. He also asked for Peter's car keys, though, which was definitely not normal, though Peter didn't get nervous when that happened. He did, however, start to get nervous when five, then ten minutes passed, and the policeman didn't come back.

"Umm… Is it normal for them to take this long?" Peter asked anxiously.

"No," Erik said grimly, "I don't think it is."

Peter began to fidget in his seat—at least, his fidgeting was rather more pronounced than it had been before. "Do you think he recognized you? Do you think they've figured out I was the one who busted you out of the Pentagon?"

"I don't know. But that man is a fool if he thinks he can do anything to me."

Peter's eyes flashed. "You know, I think your ego just developed its own gravity," he hissed. "Wait, is that a satellite? It is! Congratulations, your ego has _moons_!"

"Do you want to get out of this situation or not?" Erik asked testily. _One must not inflict violence on one's child,_ he reminded himself. Peter's voice was high-pitched and cracking; he was obviously nervous. _One must not inflict violence on one's child_. _One must not inflict violence on one's child… Even if they're really asking for it._

There were probably a lot of things fathers wanted to do alongside their sons, though to be honest, what those things were escaped Erik at the moment. He was, however, quite sure that being arrested and herded into the back of a police car was not one of them. He seriously doubted that this was what Peter considered acceptable 'father-son bonding time' either. And it wouldn't be happening, not tonight.

Then, something else happened. A second police car appeared and pulled up just behind the other one. The two officers began to speak amongst themselves.

"Oh my God." Peter's voice was choked, his eyes huge in his face.

"Alright, here's the plan," Erik told him, in the sort of tone that brooked no contradiction. "I'll eliminate the police officers, you run out and get your license and your car keys, and we keep moving. We get off this road; we find a different route to Indianapolis. We don't come back this way, or through this state."

"Wait." It seemed that 'brooked no contradiction' wasn't the sort of thing that applied to Peter. "When you say 'eliminate', do you mean 'kill?'"

Erik nodded. "Yes. That's what most people mean when they say 'eliminate' in a situation like this."

Horror broke over Peter's face. "You can't kill them," he protested, his voice oddly hoarse.

"I don't see that I have much of a choice."

"Yeah, you do! Look—" Peter smiled weakly "—we've got enough problems as it is without you just killing two random cops. Do you know what they do to cop killers?"

"If they die, there are no witnesses against us," Erik pointed out. "No one can prove that we were here."

Something very hard and very sharp came into Peter's face at that. "Okay," he muttered. "Here's the thing. I told you before. I'm not in it to hurt people, and if you're going to, I don't want any part of that. Here's _my_ deal: you kill them and I will leave you right here, and I will try to forget that we ever met at any point in my life."

"Are you serious?"

"As a heart attack."

The message was crystal-clear: I have gone most of my life without you, and while I _want_ you in my life, don't think for once second that I _need_ you in my life. Don't think for one second that I'll put up with this just because I want you around.

Erik thought about it (for the few short moments that he could spare in such a situation), before he winced, and nodded. "Alright then, different plan."

"You want us to get out of here on foot."

"That would be correct."

Erik levitated the duffel bag over to his lap as furtively as he could and began stuffing water bottles and some of the more nutritious food items Peter had picked up from the gas station into it, until the bag was nearly too full to zip shut. He slung the bag over his shoulder and chanced a glance back at the police officers, who mercifully seemed unaware of what he had just done.

"You ready?" Peter asked. He put one hand on the door, and slid the other behind Erik's head. _To prevent whiplash._

"Do I have a choice?" Erik retorted.

Peter grinned, bad feelings evidently forgotten. "Not really."

He was abandoning the car, their one reliable means of transportation that didn't leave Erik feeling like he was going to be violently ill, all because his eighteen-year-old son whom he didn't know for sure was even his son until today didn't want him to kill a couple of cops. Erik supposed that he didn't really need to be racking up any higher of a body count than he already had unnecessarily, but still, he could barely believe that he was abandoning the car on the whim of his son.

"Wanda's gonna kill me when she finds out I lost the Nova," Peter muttered. "Okay. On the count of three. One, two, three."

They left the car and the rural back road far behind them.

-0-0-0-

Peter came to a stop in the middle of a dense forest, far from the roads. And, of course, _of course_ , Erik found himself doubled-over throwing up violently the moment they came to a stop. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been so sick.

At some point, Peter had removed the duffel bag from his custody, and had taken a water bottle out of the bag. He proffered it to Erik when he was finally done vomiting, brow creased in sympathy. "You want some water?"

"Thank you." Erik's voice was raw and torn, still, his throat aching and burning, and he was grateful for the water, tepid as it was. "I don't suppose," he gasped, when he had drank what was probably at least half of the water bottle, "that you have a toothbrush and toothpaste in that bag of yours."

"Nope. Forgot."

"Of course."

Disaster (or at least, untimely arrest) averted, every last bit of nervous energy Peter clung to drained away. His shoulders sagged, his eyes drooping, and Erik considered how late it was, how long Peter had been driving without a break. "Get some sleep," he said shortly. "I'll stay up for a few hours, make sure the police aren't following us. We're starting early in the morning."

Peter didn't need any more encouragement than that. He flopped down on the ground, using the duffel bag as a pillow. "No problem; I don't sleep in much," he said thickly. "G'night, Dad."

"Good night…" Erik turned, only to see that Peter had already fallen asleep. "Good night, son," he said quietly.

Erik sat awake in the darkness under the trees and the moon and the stars, listening to his son breathe and the wind murmur against tree bark and pine needles. Occasionally, he heard a lonely birdcall high above; occasionally, he heard a distant wail of a car driving on a road, somewhere in the distance.

Eventually, he fell asleep. In his dreams, there were two children running around wearing strange costumes and playing at being superheroes in their backyard. In his dreams, Charles was smiling at him again and waving a chess piece in his face.


End file.
